The centrality dependence of Xi^- and Lambda production in Au+Au interactions at E_lab=6 AGeV is studied within a microscopic transport approach. In line with recent data, a slight enhancement of the Xi^-/(Lambda+Sigma^0) ratio toward central collisions is found. It is demonstrated that the observed production of multiple strange baryons can be traced back to multi-step meson-baryon interactions in the late stages of the collisions. Therefore, the present analysis supports an interpretation of the observed Xi abundance in terms of hadronic re-scattering.
We report the measurements of $Sigma (1385)$ and $Lambda (1520)$ production in $p+p$ and $Au+Au$ collisions at $sqrt{s_{NN}} = 200$ GeV from the STAR collaboration. The yields and the $p_{T}$ spectra are presented and discussed in terms of chemical and thermal freeze-out conditions and compared to model predictions. Thermal and microscopic models do not adequately describe the yields of all the resonances produced in central $Au+Au$ collisions. Our results indicate that there may be a time-span between chemical and thermal freeze-out during which elastic hadronic interactions occur.
An excitation function of proton rapidity distributions for different centralities is reported from AGS Experiment E917 for Au+Au collisions at 6, 8, and 10.8 GeV/nucleon. The rapidity distributions from peripheral collisions have a valley at midrapidity which smoothly change to distributions that peak at midrapidity for central collisions. The mean rapidity loss increases with increasing beam energy, whereas the fraction of protons consistent with isotropic emission from a thermal source at midrapidity decreases with increasing beam energy.
We study the collision energy dependence of (anti-)deuteron and (anti-)triton production in the most central Au+Au collisions at $sqrt{s_mathrm{NN}}=$ 7.7, 11.5, 19.6, 27, 39, 62.4 and 200 GeV, using the nucleon coalescence model. The needed phase-space distribution of nucleons at the kinetic freeze-out is generated from a new 3D hybrid dynamical model (texttt{iEBE-MUSIC}) by using a smooth crossover equation of state (EoS) without a QCD critical point. Our model calculations predict that the coalescence parameters of (anti-)deuteron ($B_2(d)$ and $B_2(bar{d})$) decrease monotonically as the collision energy increases, and the light nuclei yield ratio $N_t N_p/N_d^2$ remains approximately a constant with respect to the collision energy. These calculated observables fail to reproduce the non-monotonic behavior of the corresponding data from the STAR Collaboration. Without including any effects of the critical point in our model, our results serve as the baseline predictions for the yields of light nuclei in the search for the possible QCD critical points from the experimental beam energy scan of heavy ion collisions.
The hadron ratios measured in central Au-Au collisions are analysed by means of Hadron Resonance Gas (HRG) model over a wide range of nucleon-nucleon center-of-mass energies ranging from 7.7 to 200 GeV as offered by the STAR Beam Energy Scan I (BES-I). We restrict the discussion on STAR BES-I, because of large statistics and over all homogeneity of STAR measurements (one detector) against previous experiments. Over the last three decades, various heavy-ion experiments utilizing different detectors (different certainties) have been carried out. Regularities in produced particles at different energies haven been studied. The temperature and baryon chemical potential are deduced from fits of experimental ratios to thermal model calculations assuming chemical equilibrium. We find that the resulting freeze-out parameters using single hard-core value and point-like constituents of HRG are identical. This implies that the excluded-volume comes up with no effect on the extracted parameters. We compare the results with other studies and with the lattice QCD calculations. Various freeze-out conditions are confronted with the resulting data set. The effect of feed-down contribution from week decay and of including new resonances are also analysed. At vanishing chemical potential, a limiting temperature was estimated as T=158.5 MeV with 3 MeV uncertainty.
The yield for the multi-strange $Xi^{-}$ hyperon has been measured in 6 AGeV Au+Au collisions via reconstruction of its decay products $pi^{-}$ and $Lambda$, the latter also being reconstructed from its daughter tracks of $pi^{-}$ and p. The measurement is rather close to the threshold for $Xi^{-}$ production and therefore provides an important test of model predictions. The measured yield for $Xi^{-}$ and $Lambda$ are compared for several centralities. In central collisions the $Xi^{-}$ yield is found to be in excellent agreement with statistical and transport model predictions, suggesting that multi-strange hadron production approaches chemical equilibrium in high baryon density nuclear matter.